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Book #72: The Sandcastle Empire by Kayla Olson

Before the war, Eden’s life was easy—air conditioning, ice cream, long days at the beach. Then the revolution happened, and everything changed.

Now a powerful group called the Wolfpack controls the earth and its resources. Eden has lost everything to them. They killed her family and her friends, destroyed her home, and imprisoned her. But Eden refuses to die by their hands. She knows the coordinates to the only neutral ground left in the world, a place called Sanctuary Island, and she is desperate to escape to its shores.

Eden finally reaches the island and meets others resistant to the Wolves—but the solace is short-lived when one of Eden’s new friends goes missing. Braving the jungle in search of their lost ally, they quickly discover Sanctuary is filled with lethal traps and an enemy they never expected.

This island might be deadlier than the world Eden left behind, but surviving it is the only thing that stands between her and freedom.

The Sandcastle Empire by Kayla Olson is a sci-fi dystopian book from June’s OwlCrate box. Some have called this book a mix between Lost and The Maze Runner series. To be honest, that may be true.

While reading, I kept thinking of Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. Not because everyone is on boats looking for the last piece of land. Eden and three other girls are complete strangers on their way to escape from a prison camp in an island. It’s a friggin’ concentration camp on an island. Now, the Waterworld thought comes in because there is a large amount of flooding that has destroyed and changed the world.

Most of the world is now ocean and islands.

Now, that might sound interesting and adding the almost Third Reich bad guys, called the Wolfpack, the book sounds pretty cool. Unfortunately, it didn’t really grab me. It was one of those books that wasn’t for me. That isn’t to say that it isn’t a well written book.

It is. Olson writes well, I liked the basis of her characters. It was just the world was pulling me away from the story and the characters. I felt disjointed and I didn’t care one way or another. It just wasn’t for me.

I do plan on giving my copy to my brother though. This is the kind of stuff he will like and I think he will be a bigger fan of the book than I am.